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Well, the Tarot de Paris deck is strange and funny, no doubt. And partly made with not too much care.

If the 1559 interpretation is correct, and the commissioners were indeed Louis Gonzaga (20 years old) and Filippo di Piero Strozzi (18 years), these funny and careless elements perhaps are explained by the youth of the soldiers, who perhaps wished to amuse their French comrades with a new Italian game (new in France, not in Italy).
It was just declared peace, it were festivities and card playing was used to bridge the time between festivity A. to festivity B. A good part of alcohol, gambling, tournaments, nice ladies etc ... Why not use some money to sponsor a Tarocchi card production? It would make a nice gift for various opportunities, establishing French-Italian friendships.

The Fante initial has been pointed by Depaulis, this sound undoubtedly like an Italian origin evidence, he also describes the pips as "of Spanish inspiration" (I'd really like to see some more evidences about that last point if anyone has something handy, specifically regarding the four Aces (ars) and both the 2 of Épées and Bâtons).

Bertrand

This german cards (ca 1475-1500)fits here very well. Unicorns, gryphons...

The German deck is usually related to the Habsburger weddings 1496 (children of emperor Maximilian) with the crown of Spain (Isabella and Ferdinand children). I think (I'm not sure), this was mainly dated on the base of the use of Pomegranates, which are assumed to have remembered the victory in Granada in 1492.

The celebrations in 1559 in Paris opened with a peace contract between Habsburg and France, which indeed finished a long period of war between them.
The "Italian wars" are counted from 1494 till 1559.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wars

It was then concluded to have a marriage of a French king's daughter with Philipp, King of Spain (who became King in 1556, after the abdication of Charles V, so relative short before 1559).

On 30 June 1559, at the Place Royale at the Hôtel des Tournelles, during a match to celebrate the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis with his longtime enemies, the Habsburgs of Austria, and to celebrate the marriage of his daughter Elisabeth of Valois to King Philip II of Spain, King Henry was mortally wounded by the lance of Gabriel Montgomery, captain of the King's Scottish Guard.

There might have been well in 1559 some political reason to relate to this earlier deck from 1496.

But the quality of the surviving deck let's one assume, that it very likely wasn't the one and only and "very fine" triumph deck for this wedding.
So there's just the reason to assume a "later copy" ... perhaps. Or that it had been a celebration deck of a "lower level".

Well, one should compare all cards. Great THANK YOU for the observation.

For those that don't allready have the tarot anonyme de Paris I found this beautiful tarot deck on this website :http://editions-sivilixi.com/
There is also on this website a little commentary, unfortunately not translated in french, but interesting I believe.

Hervé Sernin wrote:For those that don't allready have the tarot anonyme de Paris I found this beautiful tarot deck on this website :http://editions-sivilixi.com/
There is also on this website a little commentary, unfortunately not translated in french, but interesting I believe.

Hi Hervé, welcome to the forum. I've seen some discussions about editions-sivilixi on Aeclectic, thanks for posting it here as well. I was lucky enough to get a copy of the Tarot de Paris from a wonderful member of the forum who lives in Japan. I'm not sure where these new copies are coming from as it has been incredibly hard to find the deck in recent years. There have been happy reports of the decks arriving on Aeclectic, so perhaps a great opportunity for those who don't already have a copy of this wonderful, 17th century deck.

The Tarot will lose all its vitality for one who allows himself to be side-tracked by its pedantry. - Aleister Crowley

This is a deck that references many early designs from German and Italian playing cards, along with trumps from several hand painted decks (e.g. the incredible world card, that has four putti, a drape and naked lady standing on a globe, as if every previous design is being referenced and combined), along with some classicized designs I've never seen before (e.g. the standing Romanized emperor and empress).

It seems almost too rich, detailed and multi-sourced for a simple printed deck; is it a copy of a hand painted one that was originally made for a collector or someone with access to many expensive decks that he or she could show to the card painter?

Jim Schulman wrote:I have a really dumb question, not related to the deck's dating.

This is a deck that references many early designs from German and Italian playing cards, along with trumps from several hand painted decks (e.g. the incredible world card, that has four putti, a drape and naked lady standing on a globe, as if every previous design is being referenced and combined), along with some classicized designs I've never seen before (e.g. the standing Romanized emperor and empress).

It seems almost too rich, detailed and multi-sourced for a simple printed deck; is it a copy of a hand painted one that was originally made for a collector or someone with access to many expensive decks that he or she could show to the card painter?

In the case, that the dating 1559 is right for the whole deck, the search for the commissioner leads to two young Italian men in the age of 18 and 20 years and these young men are not "Nobody" in history, but have family background (Gonzaga in Mantova - which means Isabella d'Este - and Strozzi in Florence - Germini notes in 1517/18) with other relations to Trionfi and Tarot cards. And the Gonzaga appear later in France as related to Tarot documents (Tarot rules of 1637).
The Strozzi / Gonzaga heraldic appears at the 2 of coins, often the card used for the producer. More or less these both are only Italian heraldics in the deck - beside Milan - and both fought in the French army, but the war had ended in early 1559 and was followed by the typical festivities with opportunity to amuse oneself at variou opportunities, for instance at the playing card table.

Huck wrote:But the quality of the surviving deck let's one assume, that it very likely wasn't the one and only and "very fine" triumph deck for this wedding. .. so there's just the reason to assume a "later copy" ... perhaps. Or that it had been a celebration deck of a "lower level".

So, whatever the dates, the printed decks are probably copies of an earlier hand painted deck.

Is this common? Do more card makers have access to hand painted or other high quality decks for use as models. Much of the printing history seems to be of card makers copying/restoring/reimagining decks from damaged woodblocks or poorly preserved cards. The use of valuable, high quality past decks as models would act as a better preservative of early iconographies.

Huck wrote:But the quality of the surviving deck let's one assume, that it very likely wasn't the one and only and "very fine" triumph deck for this wedding. .. so there's just the reason to assume a "later copy" ... perhaps. Or that it had been a celebration deck of a "lower level".

So, whatever the dates, the printed decks are probably copies of an earlier hand painted deck.

Is this common? Do more card makers have access to hand painted or other high quality decks for use as models. Much of the printing history seems to be of card makers copying/restoring/reimagining decks from damaged woodblocks or poorly preserved cards. The use of valuable, high quality past decks as models would act as a better preservative of early iconographies.

Maybe I don't understand your question.
Productions of either hand painted or printed decks have natural destinies. Either they were imitated or repeated by later productions and so influenced later developments or not.
Hand painted cards cards have the realistic chance to be "single decks", printed cards very likely have a much smaller chance to be "single decks".
Early findings of playing cards often enough don't allow much conclusions about the numbers of the really produced decks.
When I say, that the Tarot de Paris was likely from 1559, then I actually can only speak from the design of the coin suit. Actually somebody else much later might have composed the deck from different influences, and took only the coin suit from the deck of 1559, which naturally would make my conclusion foolish. In the case of Trionfi cards with style of 15th century we definitely know about later "forgery cases".

from "Tarot, Tarock, Tarocchi", Hoffmann, Dietrich, 1988

Likely a remake of 19th century according a technical research of 1955. The first is the falconer (Fool 1), the second was identified as "Queen of Cups". It's rather obvious, that the falconer is very similar to Kaplan I, Rosenthat Tarocchi, p. 99. The so-called queen-of-cups is very similar to the Star in the same deck.
So, if the analysis "c. 19th century" is true, what shall we take of this? If an artist copied just an older deck, then I could get information about a possibly 15th or 16th century deck from the forgery. However, If an artist in 19th century just got the fancy to make "historical cards of his own imagination", I might be rather fooled.

Now the Rosenthal Tarocchi is also "under suspicion" to be forgery, but if this is forgery, then also the Victoria-Albert (Kaplan 1, p. 100) and the von-Bartsch (Kaplan 1, p. 100) look also like forgery. That would a "little too much" and so I assume, that there was a "real old deck", which distributed these variations.
As the variations twice contain a motto of Isabella d'Este (ace of cups, "nec spes nec metu"), but also the Visconti viper of Milan (also twice), I would assume, that they belong to the moment, in which Isabella d'Este could take influence on Milan, and this was in 1512, hen Massimiliano Sforza was installed as new duke of Milan.

Well, that's a "working hypothesis", the whole deck family might be much later "forgery" or just "enthusiastic imitation" and "glorification of earlier times".

Similar to this the Tarot de Paris might be also insecure. And other datings and decks might have similar insecurities.

Thanks to this thread, I just received the facsimile edition put out by Andre Dimanche. I am stunned by these cards. The stenciled coloring is incompetent, the woodcuts are so-so, but the underlying compositions are small masterpieces. The figures are lively, and their expressiveness seems to arise from them being contorted and in compressed spaces. I'm no art historian, but they shout mannerism to me. 1559 would not be a far fetched date for this style. The only fly in the ointment is that the court cards look similar to the Landsknechte or other mercenaries in thirty years war etchings.

Some specifics qustions: Is temperance putting out a fire? What's the creature holding the ace of swords banner?

Then there's the overload of symbolism, in the coins, cups and in the margins of some of the trumps.